Essential Research: 54-46 to Coalition

Essential Research records next to no change on voting intention, and a general lack of sympathy for the view that unemployment benefits haven’t kept up over the years.

The latest weekly Essential Research result maintains the outfit’s record of consistency with the major parties unchanged on last week – the Coalition leads 48% to 36% on the primary vote and 54-46 on two-party preferred – and the Greens up a point from last week’s unusually poor result to 9%.

Whereas attitudinal questions often point to a social democratic bent among the population at large, questions posed this week on Newstart indicate that this particular buck stops with unemployment benefits. Fifty-three per cent agreed with the proposition that the current welfare system created a “culture of dependency”, with only 30% opting for the alternative proposition that current benefits are “the least a civilised society should provide”. In relation to Newstart benefits specifically, 33% said they were not high enough, 30% about right, and 25% too high. As Bernard Keane notes in Crikey today, variation by party support was not as pronounced as it often is in relation to such questions.

Further questions dealt with trust in various industries, with good rankings for agriculture (72%), tourism (68%) and manufacturing (56%) and poor ones for banking (33%), mining (32%), media (30%) and, tellingly, power companies (18%). Crikey will tomorrow publish Essential’s biannual “trust in media” results, which always makes for fun reading for critics of the fourth estate.

UPDATE (25/1/13): An automated phone poll for the Tasmanian seat of Bass, conducted by ReachTEL for the Launceston Examiner, has produced a dire result for Labor, with incumbent Geoff Lyons trailing Liberal candidate Andrew Nikolic 60.3-39.7 on two-party preferred. The primary votes are 54.7% for Nikolic, 26.7% for Lyons and 8.7% for the Greens. The sample size for the poll is 543.

I quite like Senator Crossin but less than half of politicians seem to leave politics of their own choosing and they would all know this prior to starting the job. It’s only human to feel anger at long service to the party not being respected – but that’s the way the game works it would appear.

Did she really say that? I shouldn’t be surprised I guess. She is a foul mouthed frump with poison for blood. Typical of the Liberals. They are only ever truly happy when people are unhappy and trodden underfoot.

WWP and Gecko re the VIC health funding and Plibersek’s comments my point was that we should show some scepticism about those types of announcements rather than just assume they are accurate. Both sides play political games with the truth. In this case Plibersek is trying to divert attention away from federal government budget decisions that have a direct impact on health funding in 2012/13.

782 jwI lived through Ben Chifley, and I have no doubt he’d be spinning in his grave if he knew the type of person currently leading his party.

I am not a member, but have been a lifelong voter.

If you read L F Crisp’s biography of Ben Chifley, I think you might find the reverse. Chifley spent a lot of time on the outer in the 30s and then was subject to spoiler tactics from Lang Labor in NSW while PM. Shades of the Rudd destabilising of the last few years.

Chif also did not have many friends among the media owners and was subjected to a lot of personal attacks. Given the advantage of time, I’m sure he’d be very much in favour of the reforms passed by this government, even the attack on Big Tobacco.

Tanya is trying to direct attention TO the Federal health contribution to Victoria not away from it. Ted’s claim that a formula didn’t work how he wanted is a bit thin (ie bald lie he had been called on).

The conservative commentator Andrew Bolt has labelled the Premier, Barry O’Farrell, an “idiot” and lampooned his request for an inquiry into racial vilification laws in NSW as “straight out of the Leninist playbook”.

Scepticism is indeed wise but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that Federal Labor has been anything but devoted to improving the nations health through generous funding. I doubt Tanya has any need to bend the truth with a state government that has cut the arse out of most things to get a surplus and retain its AAA rating.

zoomster 817
How the media interprets the event??
“As an advocate and federal representative for the NT, I will not be making further comment until I have spoken with and consulted NT branch members and my colleagues”
Yep that is a TOTAL media beat up.
Just another classic backstab by Gillard.
Backs to the wall peeps Gillard is coming.

Japan's Deputy Prime Minister Has A Modest Proposal For The Elderly: "Hurry Up And Die"

Everyone knows that Japan, whose population is now at the oldest average age it has ever been in its history, sold more adult than baby diapers for the first time in 2012, and is "older" than any nation in the world, has a "demographic problem."

What few may know, however, is that it also has a secret plan to fix said "demographic problem" - a solution that would make Hitler, Goebbels and Stalin proud.

Earlier today, Taro Aso, 72 years young, and the deputy PM of the man set to unleash Abenomics on Japan (for the second time, only this time it will be different), suggested that the elderly in Japan should just "hurry up and die" because "You cannot sleep well when you think it's all paid by the government."

john wright @# 756
They did have my vote, until now. I don’t like Gillard, but that wasn’t enough to deter me. Now it is.

It would appear that it does not take much to shift the vote of John Wright. It would appear that policies and the economy come a very distant second to pre selection maneuvering. If that is the case we can expect John Write to change his mind at least a dozen times before the election.

Andrew Bolt’s readers (and I expect Alan Jones’ listeners and followers of other right wing populist media figures) seem to pine for a time before multiculturalism and even before post-war immigration when Anglo Australians ruled the roost, Aborigines ‘knew their place’ and all of their neighbours looked and thought like themselves. It is only 40 years since racism informed our immigration policy and many ‘right (wing) minded’ people wish it still did. They feel disempowered because they can no longer tell racist jokes without risking disapproval. They also seem to have a strongly hierarchical view of Society. While white, working class people were way down on the totem pole, they could still look down on and despise Aborigines and other non-whites, non-Anglo Europeans and assorted others including unwed mothers and gay people. Now they are losing their right to sneer at their neighbours and are therefore getting paranoid, afraid that maybe they’re now on the bottom of the heap. I think this is what the Andrew Bolts and Alan Joneses of the world exploit to gain an audience for their poisonous rantings.

Labor MP Andrew Leigh said that while rank and file preselections were the ideal system, he could understand Ms Gillard's frustration about the lack of indigenous representation in the Labor Party.

"I can understand the Prime Minister's determination to have an Indigenous representative in the House of Representatives," he told Fairfax Media.

He said it was important the the Labor caucus looked like the "rest of Australia", adding that rank and file preselections had failed to preselect an indigenous candidate for 12 decades.

Dr Leigh said that while his experiences with Senator Crossin had "all been "terrific", he had found himself turning to Liberal MP - and indigenous parliamentarian - Ken Wyatt for informal advice on indigenous issues.

"I feel myself being pulled in two directions," he said of Tuesday's announcement

About this blog

William Bowe is a doctoral candidate with the University of Western Australia’s Discipline of Political Science and International Relations. He has been running the electoral studies blog The Poll Bludger since January 2004, independently until September 2008 and thereafter with Crikey.